EXCLUSIVE GREENLAND.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2334, 27 September 1921, Page 1

EXCLUSIVE GREENLAND.

A LITTLE-KNOWN COUNTRY,

DIFFICULTIES OF ENTRANCE,

There is .something significant in the visit of the King and Queen of Denmark to Greenland. This is the first time Greenland has been visited by its King.

It can be said of Greenland that it is the most exclusive country in the world next to Tibet, and more mistaken notions are held about it probably than any other land. In the first place, you cannot land there without the permission of the Danish Government, and there is only one Englishman living to-day who has visited it, namely Mr Roger Pocock. From 1735, right up till now, only two' Englishmen have set foot in Denmark’s northern possession.

A small gunboat patrols the coast in summer, but it is not the gunboat or the International Treaty which keeps steamers away from its shores. The law is backed by the menace of an unbuoyed, unlighted const, uncharted tides and currents, the ice-pack, the berg-stream and fog. For a ship to attempt to reach a settlement without a Danish pilot spells disaster. Yet the Government trading ships visit the colony every year, safely negotiating the dangerous coasts because of the secret pilot book they carry, a copy of which no one has yet been able to secure.

It was 200 years ago that Dr. Hans Egede, a Danish Lutheran clergyman, settled in Greenland, and to-day the Greenland Eskimos, who number 22,000, arc all Christians. It was to help the mission that the Danish Government planted trading posts up and down the coast very much like those of the Hudson Bay Company, to buy seal-oil, eiderdown, skins, and walrus-ivory from the natives, in exchange for coffee, sugar, doth, needles, and other treasures of the white man.

The “Royal Trade,” as it is called, loses about £5,000 a year, but Dennark has always been anxious over ;he welfare of these little people of :he far North. Liquor and disease

are the two evils which the Government endeavour to keep out of the colony. Every man, no mattey his position, is stripped and medically examined before he can proceed to Greenland. So carefully is the rule enforced, that the last case of contagious disease in Greenland was one of smallpox in 1825, f)(i years ago. While in Northern . Canada, Siberia and Alaska, the Eskimo tribes are gradually dying out, those of Greenland are increasing. Although some 240 Danish gentlefolk live among the Greenland Eskimos, you can hardly refer to them as their rulers, for the Eskimos govern themselves. The latter are all armed, while the Danes arc not. They run their own affairs without the least interference. There is no government, as we understand the term, and no policeman—and there has been no crime for 100 years back. It is the pure anarchy which politicians and philosophers dream about, and the only example ever realised in this wicked world. It is because the Eskimos are a fine race of people, and the Danes wise and good.

Contrary to general belief, the Greenland Eskimos do not lead a nomadic life, wandering here and there, but dwell in settlements, of which there aro 17(1, all scattered along the coast, the two capitals being Godthaab and Godlmvn. In the larger towns or settlements one finds churches with steeples, organs, and oil paintings. Here you will find pure-blooded Eskimo priests and physicians, as well as a nalive newspaper and an illustrated journal produced entirely by Eskimo labour. In the summer months the climate is delightful, Southern Greenland being on a level with the Shetland Islands. The people have gardens, where they grow broccoli, radishes, turnips, lettuces, spinach, leeks, parsley, potatoes, and carrots. Of radishes they get two crops each summer, and strawberries and cucumbers are grown and ripened regularly in frames. At Umanak is the most northerly garden in the world.

Warm winds blow during the summer, and there is much bright sunshine, so that at that season many of the people go about almost naked. Mosquitoes and dies are a great plagues.

Greenland is not so large as it apepars on an ordinary map, being but 150,000 square miles in area. True, the interior of the country is a vast ice-cap or glacier, which pours, it is estimated, a thousand mjllion tons of ice into the ocean every year. Every European who has lived in Greenland longs to go back, and the King and Queen of Denmark were no doubt charmed 1 with this distant part of their realm,

especially if they saw, as they probably did, some of the magnificent auroras and solar halos that are very common.